 So each of you have been chosen by your services, your agencies, and your nations to attend this prestigious institution and to be taught by our highly esteemed faculty who are the leading scholars and expert in their fields. So today marks a great point of transition into your next level of leadership and it is certainly to be celebrated so go ahead and give yourselves a hand clap. So my charge today is to help you continue your success during this academic year that is designed to develop you into future strategic leaders. Indeed, I would imagine that there may be a few folks in here who are thinking, man, I haven't been in a college environment in a long time. I sure hope I can keep up. That's okay. I'm also guessing that there are a few others who are thinking, oh please, I got this. Hang it on. You know who you are. Here's the thing. The reality for many, if not most of you is that you have not been in an academic environment or academics have not been at the forefront of your primary responsibilities in your most recent assignments. So in order for you to continue your success in this intellectually elevated academic arena, a significant shift in mindset is required. Today's ethics imposing is a perfect example. As you can see, we did not have long briefs on right versus wrong rules or policies or commanders telling you you shouldn't do stupid stuff. As while all of those things are certainly important, we are challenging you to broaden your understanding of ethics through the lens of your professional responsibility. So as Admiral Harley explained and Dr. Lucas further articulated, society has accorded you a special trust as members of the profession of arms to provide the vital function of national defense. That trust carries with it the expectation that you will continually further your expert knowledge in the profession you represent in order to meet the needs of the nations you serve. Therefore, you have a professional ethical responsibility to further your expert knowledge in the profession you represent in order to meet the needs of the nation you serve. So during this academic year, we are going to challenge you to continue your professional ethical responsibilities. So how might you do that? Well certainly we have writing assistance and research support and study techniques available here to you at the college. But what I'd like to do is offer you a broader framing for your academic preparation that establishes the context for what is necessary for you to further develop into strategic leaders and your role in that development process. Now I have to forewarn you that I am very partial to using analogies in my teaching method. So please bear with me as I use this approach for our purposes today. So recently in my own life journey, I have found myself being reminded repeatedly of a very old proverb that uses the imagery of a farmer plowing his land and the hard work that this entails. The proverb goes something like this, no man or person who puts his hand to the plow and looks backward is able to be productive in his work. No man or person who puts his hand to the plow and looks backward is able to be productive in his work. So imagine if you will the traditional act of plowing. You had the plow itself which may or may not have been pulled by oxen or horses and the farmer pushing the plow forward to create furrows or trenches for where the seeds are to be planted. The farmer guides the plow looking straight ahead to ensure that those furrows are straight in order for the fill to be plowed efficiently and effectively. If the farmer while plowing continually looks backward, he can only see the trail behind him lacking any view of the furrows being created in front of him. And because he's looking backward, those furrows are likely to be ill-shaped and crooked and not in the proper condition to receive the seeds that are to be sown. The idea here is that it is difficult to effectively perform a required task to be productive and achieve the desired result if one is consumed by the past blocking the ability to focus attention on what is in front or what lies ahead in the future. Effective plowing requires facing forward. Now this same advice equally applies to your Naval War College journey. Here's how. Each of you brings a wealth of past experience and knowledge to the table and you have clearly performed well in your duties and responsibilities to this point in your careers. You've developed your technical competence, your tactical expertise, and specific leadership abilities. Some of you have led sailors or soldiers or troops or teams or forces in very difficult and challenging circumstances while others have functioned very effectively as very significant contributors in your services and agencies. Early then, during seminar discussion, you will naturally default to regularly referencing your past experiences, which is a good thing. Such contributions are integral to the learning environment and to the seminar discourse. However, focusing only on your past experiences, that is spending all of your time and effort looking backward, blocks any opportunity for you to develop further and prepare for your next level of leadership. You see the evolution into a strategic leader is less dependent upon your past successes or how you previously excelled than it is on the further development of more advanced abilities. After this, every farmer brings to bear his or her experience from the last planning season, but each planning season is new with new conditions and maybe even new crops. The new season that awaits you as strategic leaders is volatile, it is uncertain, it is complex, and it is ambiguous. It is a season with near-peer competitors and rogue non-state actors. In this environment, the required thinking is not linear or ordered. The in-states are not known. The decision outcomes are interdependent and in certitude is the expected norm. So this necessitates planting new seeds in the form of a higher order way of thinking, heightened self-awareness, greater cultural adeptness, and broadened strategic perspectives. In order for these more sophisticated skill sets to be properly planted throughout your Naval War college tenure, you must keep your hand on the plow and remember to face forward. Yes? Yes? Right. So, as I continue to reflect upon the truth of this sound wisdom, it got me to thinking about the whole concept of plowing and how this might relate to your overall Naval War college experience. I wondered what's the process of plowing, what's the purpose of plowing, what happens when fields go un-plowed? So I did my homework and here's what I found. Plowing involves breaking up hard soil that has become dense and compact as a way of preparing the ground for seeding. As the plow moves forward, soil tails on either side creating the furrows for sowing new seeds. In essence, plowing makes planting easier. What plowing does is it turns over the upper layer of soil, bringing to the surface fresh nutrients so that they can fertilize new plants while also burying weeds and the remains of previous crops allowing them to break down as well. The whole plowing process gives seeds the best chance to germinate and grow. So let's apply this concept of plowing to your development as strategic leaders. Well first let me be clear, I am not calling you dense, just saying. I am however calling out the tendency for all of us to be set in our ways, especially when we know our jobs and we know them well. To quote a line from the movie Taken, I have a very particular set of skills. Skills that I've acquired over a very long career, skills that make me a nightmare to people like you, best line ever, yes and yet. In order to effectively move from one leadership level to the next, we must allow ourselves to be plowed, to subject ourselves to tilling, there we go, to get outmoded ways of thinking out of the way and to bring fresh knowledge to the surface. In order to do this, we must, lost my train of thought here for a second, we must focus on further developing who we are and how we want to broaden ourselves as members of the profession. So one of the things that we have learned, I had an opportunity to sit in on a leadership discussion among a group of admirals and strikingly during this session, the four star challenged these admirals to guard against relying on their technical knowledge in the execution of their strategic level duties. In other words, he challenged them and warned them of the pitfalls of relying solely upon their lower level leadership experience in the execution of their strategic leader duties. This is exactly the point that Marshall Goldsmith made in his popular leadership book, What Got You Here Won't Get You There. What Marshall Goldsmith says is that in order to move from one leadership level to the next, or as we assume higher level leadership responsibilities, we must recognize that certain actions, behaviors and ways of thinking that may have served us well as lower level leaders can in fact become hindrances as more senior level leaders. So therefore, we must work on building a complementary set of new skills. But importantly, moving from one leadership level to the next doesn't just happen. It requires development. It requires cultivation. This year at the Naval War College is designed to cultivate. But the curriculum and the faculty can only do so much. You have skin in this game. The choice is yours as to whether you will be fertile land that produces a fruitful harvest or fallow ground that prevents seeds from germinating and growing. Here's what I mean. Fertile land is land that has rich nutrients. It has good internal drainage and sufficient aeration that provides a place for roots to anchor and grow. Placing this in the context of the Naval War College experience, these are students who open their aperture for learning, who allow their assumptions to be challenged, who listen to understand rather than listen to refute. These are students who are willing to surrender their way of thinking in order to learn as much as possible. These students tend to have an inherent desire and they put the work in to strengthen themselves as leaders. Conversely, fallow ground is land that is unplowed and hard. It's land that could be productive, but for whatever reason hasn't been broken up. These are the students whose inherent skepticism makes them an impermeable surface, whose entering mindset is prove it to me, whose tendency is to judge rather than to hear, whose preference is only for modes of learning in which they are accustomed. These students tend to be wedded to their existing knowledge and know-how, preferring the comfort of the known over the discomfort of the unknown. Clearly, students who choose to be fertile ground are likely to get the most out of their Naval War College experience. This is what that looks like in practice. Captain retired John Meyer and I teach the critical thinking for adaptive leaders elective. Now the elective is specifically designed to really push students out of their thinking and learning comfort zones. The goal is to further develop students' mental agility and cognitive ability as further preparation for strategic leadership. The course utilizes a specific teaching method that really strips students of their comfortable way of processing information. It surfaces biases and it really challenges students to elevate their learning at a much deeper level. The course is hard. The course is really hard. Several weeks ago, Captain Meyer and I received the feedback from our most recent course. The feedback stunned us. It was way beyond anything that we could have imagined or expected. I'd like to share a few of those comments with you but please note I am in no way sharing these to be self-congratulatory but rather to make an important point so please bear with me. Unquestionably, this class will help future leaders understand themselves in complex situations better. The skills developed and enhanced in this course transcend all life settings and valuable exclamation point. I have never taken a course that has so profoundly altered my viewpoints or given me more tools to be successful as a leader and a teammate. This is a course that allowed me to push the limits on my way of thinking what an amazing learning experience. That feedback left us speechless and as Captain Meyer and I reflected on the feedback and reflected on the course and reflected on how each of those students indicated how much they had grown as a person and as a leader, we came to one very important conclusion. It was them, not us. As much as we would like to think that we were all that in a bag of barbecue chips, the reality is that we really didn't do that much differently in teaching the course that term than we've done in teaching the course over the past six years. The difference was that each of those students were willing to be cultivated. They came into that class with a genuine palpable desire to grow as people and as leaders. They were willing to have their weed roots dug out and their hard clumps broken up and their soil tilled in order to bring in fresh knowledge. They pushed each other to produce good crops. These students were committed to continuous growth. They were fertile land. Now, of course, we've also experienced the converse. There was a student who got so hung up on the credentials of the faculty and quite frankly his own resume that he dismissively filtered everything through that lens and consequently got very little out of the course and maybe even his overall Naval War College experience. Or the student who decided that the unfamiliar teaching approach was not how she thought the course should be taught, leaving her very dissatisfied. Or the student who chose not to follow instructions, which ended up excluding him from an immersive learning experience. In his embarrassment, he unfortunately lashed out with harsh personal criticism, which ultimately reflected poorly on him. In each of these instances, I would argue that these accomplished students neglected to embody the humility that is necessary to learn and grow as leaders. They were fallow ground. You see, learning has to be cultivated. You get out of it what you put into it. If seeds are planted and not tended to, they don't take root. They dry up and they fade away. But seeds that receive the proper attention, maintain the proper moisture, are given the proper fertilization, produce very strong roots, and yield an abundant harvest. Your year at the Naval War College, if properly cultivated, should yield a harvest of preparation for strategic leadership, confidence to lead in a volatile and certain complex and ambiguous environment, and a strengthened commitment to serve your nations as leaders of character and integrity. Importantly though, we must bear in mind that getting to the point of harvest is a process that occurs over time. When the farmer plants new seeds, he or she doesn't know the exact time that those seeds are going to sprout or even what a brand new crop will look like. The farmer must trust that the seeds planted will germinate and that the growing process will yield the best crop possible. Likewise, during your year of cultivation, you must trust the Naval War College process. Some seeds of learning will immediately sprout, while others may take time to surface. One of my favorite examples of this is that of one of my former students, Marine Colonel Kay. I love Colonel Kay. Colonel Kay would walk into class each week and only half jokingly say, what kind of silliness do you have for us today? My Jack Nicholson, you can't handle the truth. But I loved him. To his credit, Colonel Kay was willing to be tilled. Even though he didn't always understand exactly why we were doing what we were doing, or he didn't get all of the assignments exactly right, he kept plowing through. You see, Colonel Kay was cognizant of the fact that he was preparing for regiment command in theater, which he assumed immediately after graduation. Five months. Five months after Colonel Kay departed the college, I get this out of the blue email from him. Here's what it said. Was thinking of you today as we consider the perspectives of a host of individuals that we may soon be working with and against. It dawned on me five months later. It happens. It dawned on me that the way I was relaying intent and leading the planning effort was directly attributable to the thought-provoking and genuinely useful guidance from our class. How cool is that? My point here is this. Don't be hard on yourselves if you don't get it immediately. Sometimes growth is delayed. Germinating takes time. So let me share one last thing that I learned from Google in my quest to understand plowing. Did you know that there is such a thing as mixed cropping where different plants are planted in the same field at the same time? Who knew? Mixed cropping, also known as intercropping or co-cultivation, involves planting two or more crops simultaneously in the same field. In general, the theory is that planting multiple crops at once will allow those crops to work together, sorry, to balance out the input and the output of the soil nutrients, to keep down weeds and insects, to avoid climate extremes in order to increase overall productivity and to utilize scarce resources to the fullest degree. Of course, this brings to mind the composition of your seminars. Every seminar will have students from different services, different agencies, different nations, different specialties. Value that diversity as a resource. Learn what each person brings to the table. Be careful not to disregard, discount or judge those diverse perspectives as they will be invaluable to you later on in your senior leadership roles. The reality is that as you advance in your leadership responsibilities, your web of obligation will be increasingly inter-service, inter-agency, intercultural, and it will involve all elements of national power, diplomatic information, military and economic, and include all types of external stakeholders. Where else will you have the opportunity to fully engage, challenge and learn from professionals in all of these arenas in such a safe environment? I encourage you to take full advantage of this opportunity both inside the classroom and out. Because one thing that we know for certain is that relationships and partnerships built at this United States Naval War College have a lasting impact on individuals and re-benefits for our global security long after you leave this place. So consider this academic year a growing season in which you will both break down and build up. Be willing to plow and be plowed. Keeping in mind that plowing is not always easy. It takes work. It takes energy to push the plow, to guide the plow and to keep those furrows straight by facing forward. And sometimes in your plowing you will come across some large seemingly immovable rocks. Those difficult times in your growing season keep digging and keep pressing because what surfaces after those rocks are removed is a field of new knowledge, of fresh crops that will best position you to excel as future strategic leaders. Your services, your agencies and your nations have invested in you this year and they fully expect to reap the benefits from the further development of all the talent that you have to offer. And so it remains your professional ethical responsibility to further your expert knowledge and to enhance your standing as a member of the profession of arms. This year is yours and with the proper plowing, planting and cultivation, I believe you got this. You got this. Thank you very much. Okay, so did you want me to take questions or pass it on to you? All right, so I will stop for a moment to see if there are any questions. We normally don't take questions after this, but just in case. Are there any questions, thoughts or observations? Everybody's ready to be plowed? Everybody's going to plow? Set for cultivating? Just checking. All right. So having seen no questions, I will now turn it over to Rear Admiral Jamie Kelly who will wrap us up.